It Had to Be You

by Delynn Royer

  “Moe.” Sean covered his other ear to shut out the blast of a loudspeaker. “It’s Sean.”

  “Sean?” Even through the crackle of static, Sean couldn’t miss the urgency in Moe’s voice. “Where the hell are ya? Ya can’t believe what’s going on here.”

  Sean had intended to ask Moe to look out front to see if Carter was still waiting in a parked car. Something told him that whatever it was that had gotten Moe so excited was more important. “What’s happening?”

  “There’s cops all over the joint. They’re upstairs now, going through your place. Geez, Sean, they say a cop was plugged in his car right across the street. Can ya believe it? I heard the shot myself, but by the time I got to the door, I didn’t see nothing. Thought it was some flivver backfiring, but then I heard the sirens, and—”

  The steady hum of static on the line lent a surreal quality to Moe’s narrative. For the second time in one day, Sean felt like he’d been sucker punched in the stomach. “When?”

  “About an hour.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “Red. Fancy. Whatta they call it... a touring car.”

  Sean swallowed hard. “Nash.”

  “That’s it. How’d you know?”

  “The cop dead?”

  “Yeah. The meat wagon’s come and gone. You know about this, Sean? Why would the cops be tossing your joint?”

  Yeah. Why would they? He could think of no reason that warmed his heart. “Listen, Moe, I don’t know what’s going on, but I didn’t shoot anyone today.”

  “I know that. What do you need me to do?”

  “Nothing,” Sean said. “Just—” He hesitated, forced his jumbled thoughts into forward motion. “Keep your ears open and don’t mention I called.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Sean hung up. Owen Carter was dead, shot in his own car as he’d waited for Sean and Danny.

  Why?

  Had Sean jumped to the wrong conclusion? Had Carter been on the level about wanting to get Danny to a safe location? Or had he been eliminated as part of some double-cross among killers? Speculation was pointless. Sean didn’t know enough to hazard a guess, but that was the least of his worries.

  Across the way, Trixie and Danny sat with their heads bowed as she read to the boy, and something tightened in his gut at the idea of Grottano or anyone else trying to harm either of them. He would not let that happen.

  It took a mighty effort, but when he finally returned to where Trixie and the boy waited, he’d donned his best poker face. He sat next to Trixie, and she looked up. “How’d your call go?”

  “Everything’s Jake.”

  He settled back against the wall, tipped the brim of his hat down over his eyes, and made as if to catch some shut eye. Sleep was out of the question but that wasn’t the point.

  There was an encouraging beat of silence, then, “What’s wrong?”

  Damn it. She’d sniffed him out. He didn’t open his eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing my patootie.”

  “Let it go.”

  “I will not. Why don’t you just tell the truth? Say, ‘There’s some news, Miss Frank, and I’ll tell you all about it later.’”

  “Because I thought we were on a first name basis.”

  “Stop trying to make light. There’s something wrong. It’s written all over your face.”

  “It is not.”

  “It is. There’s this little thing in your jaw. It gets all tight when you’re worried about something.”

  Slowly, Sean pushed the brim of his hat back up and squinted at her. “What are you? Houdini? Some kind of mind reader?”

  “Houdini is an escape artist, not a mind reader.”

  “Oh, yeah. I saw his Chinese Water Torture act one time. Now I’m beginning to know what that felt like.”

  Trixie gave him an arch look but said nothing before returning her attention to Danny. She was steamed. Well, he could live with that. He could live with anything as long as she stayed in one piece.

  Yanking his hat brim back down, Sean closed his eyes again to wait for their train.

  * * *

  Trixie couldn’t decide whether she should be more angry with Sean for his silence or worried that what he wasn’t telling her was somehow worse than what her writer’s imagination could conjure. As their train left Long Island City behind and the character of the landscape changed to that of familiar villages, fields and meadows, she decided she should be a whole lot of both.

  They were running from something. Or someone. But Trixie had no way of guessing what or who. She’d gone over the past few hours several times in her mind. One minute Sean had seemed fine, relaxed even, the next, he’d looked like he’d just heard someone died.

  Maybe someone had...

  Who had he been talking to on her phone? Had Danny’s hiding place been compromised? If so, why hadn’t Sean called in reinforcements? And who was it he’d called at the Long Island City train station? She wasn’t so naïve as to believe that he’d really called Moe Rothstein.

  She wouldn’t get answers from Sean until she could get him alone. He’d made it clear, through looks and gestures, that he would not speak as long as Danny was within earshot. That alone didn’t bode well...

  “Are we going to Kansas?” Danny asked suddenly from where he sat beside her. His forehead rested against the cold glass window as the rural landscape rolled by.

  “Kansas?” Trixie looked at Danny in surprise. He’d calmed down considerably from earlier. Now he just looked little-boy tired. She exchanged a quizzical look with Sean, who sat in the seat directly opposite them. Sean just shook his head.

  “No, honey. We’ve been going in the opposite direction, toward the ocean. We’re on Long Island.”

  Danny didn’t look away from the window, but he apparently accepted her answer because he said nothing more.

  By the time they stepped out onto the raised concrete platform at Oyster Bay Station, it was late afternoon and both Trixie and Sean were running low on good spirits and cash.

  “We’re only twenty minutes from the house. Let me call for our car.” Even before Trixie got all the words out, a flicker of irritation crossed Sean’s face. “What?” she asked, piqued. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter.” His expression had smoothed out again. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought she’d imagined it. “Go ahead. Call.”

  “I will.” She tried and failed to keep the huff out of her voice as she rummaged in her purse for a nickel.

  Sean held a nickel in front of her nose. “My treat.”

  Trixie snagged the coin and marched over to the lone telephone booth in the small terminal. The sound of Applegate’s formal greeting on the other end of the wire was as familiar to her as an old shoe. “Frank residence.”

  “Applegate, it’s Trix.”

  Trixie imagined that the old butler’s lips pursed. It had been two weeks since she’d last telephoned and he was surely aware that she’d failed to return her father’s last call. “If you’re calling to speak to your father, I’m sorry, but he’s out of town, miss.”

  “I know.” Trixie was properly humbled by this reminder of her oversight. “I’m at the Oyster Bay Station and I have two guests. Could you please open some rooms and send Spink?”

  Applegate was much too disciplined to ask questions about what company she was keeping these days. “Of course, miss. Will there be anything else?”

  “Um, yes. Please ask Cook to prepare an early dinner. We haven’t eaten since this morning.”

  “Certainly, miss. Is there any particular culinary preference I should impart? Hot dogs? French fries perhaps?”

  Trixie set her teeth together at Applegate’s not-so-subtle dig at her decision to move to Brooklyn. “No
, I’m sure Cook’s choice will be just swell.”

  “Swell indeed. Very good, miss. I shall send Mr. Spink posthaste.” And with that, he rang off.

  Trixie replaced the receiver and returned to Sean, who waited outside the closed door of the men’s washroom. Something in his stance, or perhaps it was the way he seemed to mark with his eyes each anonymous traveler who moved through the small station, put her uncomfortably in mind of a sentry. What was it he was guarding against?

  “Is Danny in the washroom?” she asked when she reached him.

  “Yeah.”

  “He can’t hear us then. Spill it.”

  Sean looked at her so impassively, Trixie thought he was about to shut her out again, but before she could protest, he said bluntly, “I believe Owen Carter and his partner killed John Murphy.”

  “What?” Of all the wild possibilities that had formed in Trixie’s mind, none bore a resemblance to what Sean had just told her. In her mind’s eye, Trixie pictured Detective Carter the day he’d come to see her at the Examiner—the elegant cut of his suit, the confident manner and handsome features that had reminded her of her former fiancé. It just didn’t seem possible. She hadn’t liked Detective Carter, but...a murderer? “Are you saying...the police?” She stammered. “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Danny identified Carter’s partner Lou Grottano from that picture on the front page of your paper.”

  Trixie vaguely remembered seeing Carter with a husky, swarthy man at John Murphy’s wake, but she’d taken little notice of him. “When?”

  “Today.”

  “Oh, my stars,” was all she could say before the door to the men’s washroom opened and Danny emerged.

  “There’s more,” Sean said. “Not now.”

  Trixie nodded absently. The cops had killed John Murphy? What more could there be? Her reporter’s instincts fired up like Fourth of July fireworks at the same time that her sense of justice and all that was decent recoiled.

  “When can we eat?” Danny asked, injecting an absurd note of normalcy into the moment.

  “Just a little while yet, pal.” Sean’s voice as he answered the boy was calm and matter-of-fact and Trixie marveled at his ability to keep a cool head. Hadn’t he just learned himself that two of his fellow officers had been corrupted in a most foul and despicable way? He looked at Trixie, forcing her to focus. “Did you make your call?”

  “Uh, yes. Spink should be here shortly.”

  “Spink,” he said flatly.

  “The chauffeur.”

  “Ah.”

  Trixie was too shaken up to challenge Sean’s wry tone but she chafed at it all the same. She had enough to absorb without having to contend with Sean’s negative attitude toward her family or her father’s wealth or whatever it was that seemed to so ruffle his proud working class feathers.

  When Spink pulled up in front of the Oyster Bay Station thirty minutes later, however, Trixie winced. Why had she not thought to ask Applegate to send the Roadster rather than her father’s Silver Ghost Town Car? It swept up to the curb like a sleek and shiny six-cylinder, 48-horsepower chariot.

  “I take it that’s Spink.”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Trixie said, not looking at Sean as she pushed through the front door of the station into the crisp late autumn air outside.

  “You don’t want to hear what?” He sounded innocent.

  “Gee that’s slick! Is that our cab?” This was Danny, who rushed by them both, running up to the soft-rumbling Rolls Royce to peer in the gleaming side window. That was one good thing, anyway. It was the first time Danny had perked up since they’d left Manhattan.

  “It’s not a cab. It belongs to my father.”

  “Swell!”

  Mr. Spink, a rotund fellow with a pale moon face, stepped out of the vehicle with alacrity for such a large man. He wore a crisp black uniform and a generous smile as he swept open the door to the rear compartment. “Welcome home, Miss Beatrix.”

  Trixie smiled warmly at his welcome. Spink had been driving for her family since before the war. “Thanks, Spink. How is Mrs. Spink?”

  “Perfectly well. Thank you for asking.”

  Trixie introduced Sean and Danny.

  “Master Danny,” Spink said with a bow. “Would you care to accompany me in the front?”

  Danny did very much care to do so, and as Trixie climbed into the enclosed rear compartment, followed by Sean, Danny scrambled in to perch on the black leather front seat, eagerly examining the silver and glass dials and controls on the dash that Spink kept polished and shined.

  When they pulled away from the curb, Trixie listened to the soft purr of the engine and settled back into the plush cushioned seat. She looked at Sean, who sat close beside her physically but who was preoccupied with distant thoughts of his own.

  There was something else, and it was worse than just corruption within the ranks of his department. Trixie wished she could offer him some reassurance. She reached out impulsively, touched his arm, and he looked at her. “It’s okay,” he said, trying to reassure her rather than the other way around. “I’ll figure it out.”

  And then he looked away, leaving Trixie once again alone with her worries.

  Like all good chauffeurs, Spink possessed not only exemplary driving skills but the instincts of the best saloonkeepers. He knew when to keep quiet and when to chat. Perhaps he sensed the preoccupation in the rear compartment as well as the need to keep the young boy next to him pleasantly distracted because, during the twenty minute drive that followed, he answered all of Danny’s questions and posed innocuous questions of his own while Trixie stared out the side window.

  It was not long before she began to catch familiar glimpses of the blue harbor through the trees, of small boats battened down and moored for the winter, as they rolled smoothly north and on through the village of Cold Spring Harbor—toward home.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was not so much the English Tudor-style mansion itself—nestled as it was amid a hundred or so North Shore acres of manicured lawns—that put Sean off of the Frank estate so much as it was the butler.

  From the moment Trixie introduced Sean to the frosty old gentleman’s gentleman, Sean found himself the recipient of more heavy-lidded stares, thinly veiled insults and haughty sniffs of disdain than he could count.

  “Don’t mind him. He’s just in a mood,” Trixie whispered to Sean after Applegate had purposely dropped Sean’s dinner plate down in front of him, spilling a half-dozen green beans onto the immaculate white tablecloth. The butler had then serenely glided back out of the dining room. “It’s not you, it’s me.”

  “Are you sure?” Sean eyed Danny’s and Trixie’s green beans, which were stacked in neat pyramids on their plates. Neither had their water glasses been spilled in their laps nor their potato portions cut in half.

  “What with all that’s been going on, I forgot to call Daddy this week and Applegate’s protective that way,” Trixie said. “Not to mention he’s also still sore because I moved out.”

  Sean had no answer for this, but something she’d said made him begin to suspect what it was about Sean that so disturbed Applegate’s sensibilities.

  Applegate was protective all right—protective of Trixie, not Mr. Frank.

  Unfortunately, Applegate’s sensibilities were not something Sean had time to concern himself with. As he watched Danny wolf down a plateful of food, Sean knew that the boy and Trixie would not be safe here for long. They hadn’t been followed. Sean was sure of that, but he had to assume the worst, that Grottano knew what Carter knew. Trixie had been instrumental in finding Danny and so the Frank estate would be on Grottano’s short list to come looking for them.

  Luckily, Applegate’s disaffection for Sean didn’t extend to Danny. At Trixie’s request, the butler took the
boy under his wing after dinner, leaving Sean and Trixie alone to make their way into the library where a cozy fire burned in the hearth.

  From there, Trixie made two telephone calls—one to her landlady to let her know she would be out of town and one to Julius Merryweather to give him the number where she could be reached. At Sean’s insistence, she confided little more, only that she was with Sean and that they needed their whereabouts kept confidential.

  Outside, dusk was falling. The Frank estate was built on a bluff that overlooked a small bay that opened into the southern end of Long Island Sound. Through two glass doors that opened onto a flagstone veranda and garden at the rear of the mansion, Sean observed a spectacular view of the bay as a cold and distant sun set over the horizon in the west.

  “So, you said there’s more,” Trixie said after she hung up the phone. “What is it you haven’t told me?”

  Sean turned to see that she had settled on a divan near the fireplace. She’d freshened up before dinner, changing into a casual skirt and blouse. Now, she slipped her shoes off and tucked one leg beneath her to get comfortable.

  Trixie would be safer if she knew everything. His intention was to take both her and Danny away first thing tomorrow morning, deposit them somewhere secure, and then return alone to finish what he’d started. There was no way she would cooperate with him unless she understood the danger they were in.

  “Today,” he began, “when I made that call from your office, it was to Carter. He knew about Danny, that we found him and that he could identify Murphy’s killers.”

  For once, Trixie didn’t interrupt as he described the information that he’d reported to Carter the previous day, their plan to keep Danny under wraps, their arrangements to meet that morning before Danny had identified Lou Grottano, and last, how he’d learned through Moe Rothstein that Carter had been killed. He omitted the cops searching his own apartment.

  As he’d expected, Trixie’s eyes widened when he described the bold nature of Carter’s murder, and he was gratified to see it. He wanted her good and spooked.